President-elect Obama already has a long to-do list. But here’s another item for it: to restore science in government.

The most notable characteristic of the Bush administration’s science policy has been the repeated distortion and suppression of scientific evidence in order to fit ideological preferences about how the world should be, rather than how it is.

In his disturbing book “Undermining Science: Suppression and Distortion in the Bush Administration,” the journalist Seth Shulman describes case after case of intimidation of scientists in government posts, the suppression of scientific evidence and the perpetuation of misinformation.

The fields affected range from climate change to public health. Although some incidents are small in and of themselves, the cumulative effect is horrifying. Shulman also catalogs a long list of established government scientists who, during the course of the Bush administration, resigned their posts in despair.

The distortion and suppression of science is dangerous, and not just because it means that public money gets wasted on programs, like abstinence-only sex “education” schemes, that do not work. It is dangerous because it is an assault on science itself, a method of thought and inquiry on which our modern civilization is based and which has been hugely successful as a way of acquiring knowledge that lets us transform our lives and the world around us. In many respects science has been the dominant force — for good and ill — that has transformed human lives over the past two centuries.

In schools, science is often taught as a body of knowledge — a set of facts and equations. But all that is just a consequence of scientific activity.

Science itself is something else, something both more profound and less tangible. It is an attitude, a stance towards measuring, evaluating and describing the world that is based on skepticism, investigation and evidence. The hallmark is curiosity; the aim, to see the world as it is. This is not an attitude restricted to scientists, but it is, I think, more common among them. And it is not something taught so much as acquired during a training in research or by keeping company with scientists.

Now, I don’t want to idealize this. To claim that scientists are free of bias, ambition or desires would be ridiculous. Everyone has pet ideas that they hope are right; and scientists are not famous for humility. (Think of the opening sentence of “The Double Helix,” James Watson’s account of his and Francis Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA: “I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood.” Those words could be said of many who have not gone on to win a Nobel prize.)

Moreover, to downplay evidence that doesn’t fit your ideas, and to place more weight on evidence that does — this is something that human brains just seem to do. Worse, such biases become stronger under certain circumstances.

For example, scientists in the pay of drug companies are more likely than independent scientists to find that a given drug has a beneficial effect, and less likely to discover that it is harmful. Sometimes, such discrepancies are actually fraudulent; but often, they are due to differences in interpreting a data set, or the ways in which experiments are designed. And there is certainly room for interpretation in the results of experiments: many experiments don’t give clear-cut results.

However, the beauty of the scientific approach is that even when individuals do succumb to bias or partiality, others can correct them using a framework of evidence that everyone broadly agrees on. (Admittedly, this can sometimes be a slow process.) But arguing over data is different from suppressing it. Or changing it. Or ignoring it. For these activities debase the whole enterprise and threaten its credibility. When data can’t be accessed or trusted, when “facts” are actually illusions — well, this threatens the nature of knowledge itself. And a society without knowledge is steering blind.

The rubbishing of science is far more serious than any particular decision over whether to fund research into stem cells, the sexual behavior of fruit flies or the quarks and quirks of particle physics. Undoing the damage of the past eight years may take another eight. But it must be done. We are probably one of the last generations that will be able to use our knowledge and methods to guide human civilization to a sustainable future. This is our time.

                                                                      *    *    *

NOTES:

Thanks to Dan Haydon, Gideon Lichfield and Richard Reeve for insights, comments and suggestions.

An intact skeleton of a woolly mammoth on display at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. (S. C. Schuster)

Last week, the woolly mammoth came back.

Into the news, that is. For it has had its genome sequenced, and is the first extinct animal to have done so.

The sequence is a draft — for technical reasons, parts of it are likely to be inaccurate — and it is not yet complete. But that didn’t stop joyous speculations about the prospects for the mammoth’s resurrection.

Fossil specimen of a glyptodon in Vienna at the Naturhistorisches Museum. (Wikimedia Commons)

And I have to say, I love this stuff. I adore thinking about the science that would need to be done to bring back an extinct species, be it a mammoth or a glyptodon, a dodo or a Neanderthal. (Glyptodons were boulder-sized mammals related to armadillos, and are a particular favorite of mine. They used to live in South America, and they went extinct at about the same time as the mammoths, around 10,000 years ago.) Read more…

Next Monday — Nov. 24 — is the 149th anniversary of the day that Charles Darwin’s masterpiece, “On the Origin of Species,” was first published. In honor of that, I thought I’d look at a remark that a friend recently made: “We spend so much time wailing about extinction, but we never celebrate new species.”

Hand-colored lithograph of passenger pigeons from J. J. Audubon’s “The Birds of America.” (The New York Public Library)

Good point. But there are several reasons for the asymmetry. The most obvious is that extinction is easier to see. In the 18th century, the passenger pigeon was one of the most numerous birds on earth. Flocks of birds several miles long would fly over, blocking out the sun like an immense cloud. Some observers said the effect was like an eclipse. But by 1880, the numbers had plummeted; by 1915, the passenger pigeon had gone.

The appearance of a new species is not so dramatic. The first members of a new species will typically be indistinguishable — to us — from the species they have evolved from. And while extinction has a clear final moment — the last member of a species dies — the formation of a new species does not usually happen in a single recognizable instant. Which is why we haven’t yet raised our glasses to celebrate, say, Rhagoletis pomonella, the apple maggot fly. Read more…

(Olivia Judson is away this week.)

Here’s something I’ve found myself speculating about recently: could the obesity epidemic have a political impact? In particular, could obesity in a pregnant woman influence the eventual political outlook of her child? I came to this question after mulling over a number of facts.

First, according to a report published last month in the journal Science, strong political views are correlated with distinct physiological responses to startling noises and threatening images. Specifically, the study found that people who support warrantless searches, wiretapping, military spending and so on were also likely to startle at sudden noises and threatening images. Those who support foreign aid, immigration, gun control and the like tended to have much milder responses to the stimuli. (The study only included people who described themselves as having strong political opinions; the physiology of apathy has not been looked at.) Read more…

Last week, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) released its latest report on the state of the world’s species. It makes for gloomy reading. Although there have been a few triumphs — species increasing their numbers thanks to conservation efforts — the general picture is one of decline. A quarter of all mammal species are now endangered, mostly because their habitat is disappearing. But of all the mammals now on the endangered list, from the fishing cat to the Caspian seal, the most startling is the Tasmanian devil.

Tasmanian Devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) (Ian Waldie/Getty Images)

Tasmanian devils live on the island of (surprise!) Tasmania, off the south coast of Australia. They are marsupials: their young are born tiny (about a third of a gram — that’s a hundredth of an ounce), then fed on milk and carried in a pouch. As adults, devils are thick-set, thuggish-looking animals, with massive teeth that they use to chomp up carcasses, bones and all. Although they are far from enormous — the biggest males weigh in at around 14 kilograms (30 pounds), about the size of a French bulldog — Tasmanian devils are the largest carnivorous marsupials to have, so far, escaped extinction. Read more…

Olivia Judson is away this week.

If there is anything living on Mars, it’s going to be weird bacteria or the like, not little green men. Which is a pity. Because what we humans really need is a group of friendly, intelligent aliens to study us, and give us a report on what they find.

The problem is, in many respects it’s difficult for us to study ourselves.

First, there are practical problems. It’s easier, for example, to study organisms with much shorter lives than our own: when organisms have short lives, we can accumulate lots of knowledge about them in a single human lifetime. Hence, we know far more about bacteria, fruit flies and mice than we do about elephants, giant tortoises or sequoia trees.

Another difficulty: it’s hard to do certain sorts of experiments. Many of the experiments we can do on fruit flies would be impractical or unethical to do on people. Read more…

What do a tree that lives in the deserts of Algeria, an Asian freshwater clam and a stick insect from Sicily have in common?

The answer is that each of them has evolved a strange form of asexuality. Why strange? It involves males.

Sex, to get technical about it, is the mixing of genes from two parents to make a new individual that has a genetic contribution from both. Asexuality thus refers to any of a number of forms of reproduction that involve only one genetic parent.

That parent is typically the female. The reason is that, in many species, females can easily reproduce without males. An egg, after all, contains nutrients and other stuff that an embryo needs in order to grow. Often, the only thing the egg is missing is the set of genes that comes from the father. But this set of genes can sometimes be dispensed with — the egg can develop without it. As a consequence, females in species from aphids to dandelions are the ultimate single mothers: they reproduce without males, and each is the sole genetic parent of her offspring.

Becoming an ultimate single dad is more complicated. The problem is that sperm are little more than mobile packets of DNA: they don’t have what it takes to grow into a new individual by themselves. For an offspring to have a father but no mother thus requires some genetic jiggery-pokery. Read more…

A couple of weeks ago, the arginine vasopressin receptor 1a gene sprang into notoriety: in a just-published study of Swedish couples, variation in this gene was found to be associated with difficulties, for men, in maintaining long-term monogamous relationships. Which suggests the following mischievous thought: could such restlessness be cured one day?

First, some background. Among mammals, the sort of lifestyle that many 21st century humans idealize and strive for — a man and a woman living together for decades in a committed, sexually faithful relationship, rearing children together — is rare. Fewer than 5 percent of mammal species have evolved even an approximation of it. (The approximation is a couple living together as a social arrangement — so-called “social monogamy.” They may or may not be sexually monogamous as well.) Examples of the socially monogamous? They include Kirk’s dik-dik, a small African antelope; the fat-tailed dwarf lemur, a small primate from Madagascar; the prairie vole, a North American rodent; some human beings. Read more…

(Being the second part in a series on genetic engineering.)

Last week, I discussed rewriting the genes of viruses in order to make better vaccines. This week, I’d like to discuss the genetic engineering of mosquitoes as a way to stop the spread of dengue fever.

Dengue is caused by any of four related viruses. The disease can take a number of forms, from a mild sense of feeling below par, to dengue hemorrhagic fever, which can be lethal. Compared to diseases like malaria, dengue is a minor problem. Each year, more than 500 million people are infected with malaria, compared to “just” 50 million people for dengue. As diseases go, it’s not terribly dangerous either: the death rate from dengue hemorrhagic fever is around 2.5 percent.

Aedes aegypti. (James Gathany/CDC)

Read more…

Most of the time, talk of genetic modification revolves around crops, with claims and counterclaims as to the relative risks and benefits. Such questions are obviously important, but they have been so much discussed I don’t want to consider them again here (at least, not at the moment). Instead, I want to spend the next couple of weeks looking at other possible uses of genetic engineering.

As my first exhibit, I’ve chosen the genetic modification of a virus for the purpose of producing a safer vaccine. I like this example not just for its practical importance, but for its elegance. It exploits a fundamental property of life: the fact that there is more than one way to write a gene. Read more…

Olivia Judson is away this week.

(The fourth part in a series celebrating Charles Darwin.)

Last week, I discussed how evolutionary biology has changed since 1859, the year Darwin first published “On the Origin of Species.” But the subject of evolution isn’t the only thing that’s changed since then. There’s been plenty of actual evolution, too. For although we tend to think of evolutionary change as being something that only takes place over the course of millions of years, it isn’t. It’s going on here, now, all around us. So, this week, I thought I’d round up some examples of recent evolutionary change in nature. (What do I mean by recent? Within the last 40 years.)

I’m not intending to be comprehensive — that would take a book or two. Instead, I want to sketch a few examples of natural selection that have caught my fancy, and through them consider different aspects of evolutionary change, and what it takes to show it. Read more…

(The third part in a series celebrating Charles Darwin.)

Charles Darwin was a giant. He did not merely write “On the Origin of Species” — one of the most important books ever written by anyone — in which he describes how evolution by natural selection works, and what some of its consequences and implications are. He also wrote — and this list is not exhaustive— a treatise on the formation of coral reefs that is still thought to be correct; a definitive monograph on barnacles, both extinct and extant; a book about how earthworms make soil; a now-classic text on carnivorous plants (the ones, like Venus fly-traps, that ensnare and digest insects); a book about the strange ways that orchids get themselves fertilized; and an account of the five years he spent aboard the ship HMS Beagle, which has become a classic of travel writing. Read more…